Quotes About Reasoning

Good for you, you have a heart, you can be a liberal. Now, couple your heart with your brain, and you can be a conservative.

It would be awesome to be so impressive that we could sway people to our way of thinking just by declaiming our thoughts, but probably most of us lack such gravitas. Luckily, there's something even better: evidence, logic, and argument.

After President Obama took office, his campaign book 'The Audacity of Hope' receded into his past fast. Its sweet, naive, bipartisan 'let's reason together' passages fell away, too.

Logic is like the sword - those who appeal to it, shall perish by it.

Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.

The paradigm for intelligence was logical reasoning, and the idea of what an internal representation would look like was it would be some kind of symbolic structure. That has completely changed with these big neural nets.

I don't think I'm always right, but I would like to empower people to come to sound conclusions using a systematic way of looking at things.

What is mathematics? It is only a systematic effort of solving puzzles posed by nature.

Decision making is a skill.

Winter and Summer While it's summer people say Winter is the better season. Such is human reason. Kamijima Onitsura

The destruction of the foundations necessarily brings down the whole edifice.

It cannot be denied that he has had many exceptional ideas, and that he is a highly intelligent man. For my part, however, I have always been taught to take a broad overview of things, in order to be able to deduce from them general rules, which might be applicable elsewhere.

When it is not in our power to determine what it true, we ought to follow what is most probable.

Those who reason most powerfully and are the most successful at ordering their thoughts so as to make them clear and intelligible will always be best able to persuade others of what they say, even if they speak in the thickest of dialects

I took especially great pleasure in mathematics because of the certainty and the evidence of its arguments.

The very desire to seek the truth often causes people, who do not know how it should be sought correctly, to make judgements about things that they do not perceive and in that way they make mistakes.

Finally, if there be still persons who are not sufficiently persuaded of the existence of God and of the soul, by the reasons I have adduced, I am desirous that they should know that all the other propositions, of the truth of which they deem themselves perhaps more assured, as that we have a body, and that there exist stars and an earth, and such like, are less certain;

For there is hardly any question in the sciences about which clever men have not frequently disagreed. But whenever two persons make opposite judgements about the same thing, it is certain that at least one of them is mistaken, and neither, it seems, has knowledge. For if the reasoning of one of them were certain and evident, he would be able to lay it before the other in such a way as eventually to convince his intellect as well.

I was especially delighted with the mathematics, on account of the certitude and evidence of their reasonings; but I had not as yet a precise knowledge of their true use; and thinking that they but contributed to the advancement of the mechanical arts, I was astonished that foundations, so strong and solid, should have had no loftier superstructure reared on them.

they who make pretensions to philosophy are often less wise and reasonable than others who never applied themselves to the study

About Pierre de Fermat] It cannot be denied that he has had many exceptional ideas, and that he is a highly intelligent man. For my part, however, I have always been taught to take a broad overview of things, in order to be able to deduce from them general rules, which might be applicable elsewhere.

entre plusieurs opinions également reçues, je ne choisissais que les plus modérées, tant à cause que ce sont toujours les plus commodes pour la pratique, et vraisemblablement les meilleures, tous excès ayant coutume d'être mauvais, comme aussi afin de me détourner moins du vrai chemin, en cas que je faillisse, que si, ayant choisi l'un des extrêmes, c'eût été l'autre qu'il fallu suivre. (3e partie, para 2)

Those who possess the strongest reasoning and who best order their thoughts in order to make them clear and intelligible can always best persuade others of what they are proposing, even if they were to speak only Low Breton and had never learned rhetoric.

Ich denke also bin ich (cogit ergo sum)